This morning the HR director told us we were going to start hiring transportation workers to bus people to our different locations, and asked for a committee to come up with some standard interview questions for our office to use. I asked whether we should screen them to see whether they believe that they’ll be saved during the rapture, because if they do then they’re knowingly putting the lives of the passengers at risk when the bus suddenly becomes driverless and spirals out of control. I got some weird looks, so I pointed out that we technically work at a religious organization, so it should totally be okay to ask that.
I was not allowed to join that committee, so my guess is that they totally hired a lot of bus drivers who plan on leaving their buses driverless. I bet those drivers totally know they’re putting their passengers’ lives in jeopardy but just don’t care. Which (based on what I’ve learned on religion through TV) would probably be considered a sin. So I guess either way, our passengers will still have a driver when the rapture comes. It’s gonna be a pretty nasty surprise for those bus drivers, though.
Every HR department I’ve ever worked in has secret codes that no one else knows about, and we use them to talk about you while you’re still in the office. Here are the codes from my last job: Tucking your hair behind your ear means, “This bitch is crazy.” Tucking your hair back behind both ears means, “Totally fucking crazy.” Absentmindedly wiping your brow means, “I’m sorry. Does it look like I have ‘dumb-ass’ written across my forehead?” Picking your nose means, “Someone needs to call security.” Scratching your crotch means, “Steal second.” It worked really well until we hired a new girl who had a lot of nervous tics, and then it just became too confusing.
Last year they installed panic buttons under our desks so we could alert security if there was someone violent threatening us. We’re supposed to test it out once a month, but security is always very slow to show up to turn off the alarm. Yesterday our boss was out, so we decided to push all the panic buttons. After fifteen minutes with no response, we decided to lie down on the floor and put signs on our chests that said things like “I’ve been shot in the head” and “We’re all dead now. Thanks.” Mine said, “I’m still alive. I just came in, and I slipped on all the blood and now I’m unconscious and have a concussion. I really shouldn’t be allowed to sleep.” In true dedication to a role I actually was asleep when security showed up fifteen minutes later. They were not amused, and pointed out that it would be a smart move to be a little less bitchy to the only people in our building who were actually required to bring loaded guns to work. The next day we all got yelled at by our boss because “potential job applicants could have been scared off if they’d looked through the glass window of our office door and had seen you all lying on the floor.” I pointed out that finding bodies on the floor and not helping was sort of an interview that they had failed anyway, so technically we were kind of saving time. He was not amused.
At one of my jobs we’d have drills to see how easy it was to smuggle babies out of the building. One employee (usually a new hire, so that he or she wasn’t recognizable) was given a baby and everyone else in the building had to stop the person from sneaking out. It was a public building and none of our customers could know that we were doing a supersecret smuggled-baby drill, because it might seem unprofessional, so that made it harder. It was usually a fake baby, but you never knew whether it would be a real one brought from home. Today we had a drill and I stopped someone in the hall and wouldn’t let them go for fifteen minutes until security came, because I was sure it was the fake baby. It totally wasn’t the fake baby.